Katrina levee investigator to testify in oil spill trial

Case heads into second day of trial Tuesday

A pool of oil floats in the Gulf of Mexico more than 50 miles southeast of Venice, La., as a boat with booms tries to contain the spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig. (2010)

Photos

A pool of oil floats in the Gulf of Mexico more than 50 miles southeast of Venice, La., as a boat with booms tries to contain the spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig. (2010)

A University of California-Berkeley engineer who played a prominent role in investigating levee breeches in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is scheduled to be the first witness at a trial involving another Gulf Coast catastrophe: the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Robert Bea is an expert witness for the plaintiffs who sued BP PLC and other companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. He will share his theories about what caused BP's Macondo well to blow out in 2010, provoking a rig explosion that killed 11 workers and spewed an estimated 172 millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf.

Bea's testimony was scheduled for the second day of the trial, which could result in BP being forced to pay tens of billions of dollars more in damages.